Female Dwarf?
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| Submitted by Shadow Watcher on Fri, 2014-01-24 04:26 | ||
I was reading the DS1 Legendary Map Pack Forum and bare_elf talked about maybe adding a female dwarf to the game. Now we all know why there are no female Half Giants and why there are no male Dryads. However there are several references to Female Dwarves in both broken world and in Dungeon Siege 1, if one listens to the characters talk and reads the back stories of the games. Now bare_elf said that she could make a female head for the regular dwarf be it ds1 or ds2. Now since we have never seen a female dwarf it might be that they are not ugly short people. They could be very pretty, not have beards like they did in some stories like lord of the rings. They could be very normal looking, and very near sighted. blogs: |
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Comments
Yes I agree female dwarves could be normal looking and they might be interested in those hairy little dudes because at least in Dungeon Siege games they are the ones with all the gold, gem stones and money. Female dwarves could be gold diggers so to speak
That to me is what a dwarf looks like (besides massive beards). Different games that I've played present the dwarven women in varying ways. My opinion is the dwarf females in Dragon Age: Origins, Rift and World of Warcraft look the best, although Rift is maybe not quite so stocky. Dungeon and Dragons Online does okay with the dwarf ladies, but they look a wee bit manly around the shoulders. Lord of the Rings online does pretty good Hobbit women, but not the same thing, really and of course a dwarf woman in Tolkien's world is a rare creature.
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Dragon Age: my rogue
. DDO: my cleric
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Other games present them as cutesy poo, while their male counterparts look traditionally "Dwarf" like which pisses me right off. Cutesy is fine if BOTH sexes are presented that way (like the Catmansion people).
It's when games have this idea that female characters *have* to be sexualized and conventionally attractive. God forbid a short stocky woman be seen as anything *other* than hideous. Forsaken World is a particularly egregious offender in this department.
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Gross-I think this makes the Dwarf male look very unsavory...kinda like a pedophile.
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Anyway, I think I am ranting a bit. Whoops!
Certainly it's quite feasible to add female dwarves to the game and as you say it is mentioned in the lore so it fits in quite nicely.
In the Legendary Mod there's far more diversity in races than in the original DS1 maps, partly because of the way they evolved as the original Utraean Peninsula map used DS2 npcs and it wasn't until later that the original npcs were ported over.
In DS2 Broken World it makes sense that there's no dwarf women in the game as Glorydeep is a prison colony. In the Kingdom of Ehb, Glitterdelve is a mining settlement (can't really call it a town) and nearly everyone's been killed by the Krug as well. In the Utraean Peninsula there is Crystwind which is a proper town supporting the dwarven miners. While it also makes sense that there's other races here as well, as they would be attracted by the commerce generated by the town and set up shops to take advantage of all that dwarven gold, dwarven women could be added to the town and fit quite nicely in. In other places there could be one or two hear and there wherever dwarves are found.
The question is do we want playable dwarven females or just some dwarf female npcs? If it's the latter then the stock female body could be resized and scaled a bit so it was stockier with Dllullu's scaling tool. Just resizing the bodies looks strange which is why I changed that method in the Legendary Mod as the original dwarves were just resized humans but looked weird. Then it's a matter of designing new faces for them, which I'm sure Kathcf and bare_elf would just love to do.
If we want playable dwarf females then that's a completely different kettle of fish. Anything other than simply resizing the bodies will require all new meshes and textures to be created, even if the textures are just renamed original textures. Still simple enough to achieve. Simply resizing the bodies will end up with very lithe, petite characters looking more like children or teenagers than dwarves.
Incidentally if you want to see what effect resizing will have and get an indication of what it looks like in a playable character then check out Dark Elf's GiantGnome mod found here http://siegetheday.org/?q=node/1338
I really do not think a playable dwarf female is necessary, but hanging out in places like Crystwind maybe other big towns and cities where male dwarves already exist. I do not think right off creating a playable female dwarf is necessary.
But as far as animations, could they not use the same as the male dwarf just renamed? Could actually use the DS2 male dwarf body renamed with a few new heads. However that is just my input maybe shadow watcher, KathyCF and others have better ideas.
Swapping heads between models doesn't always work - in fact in most cases it doesn't and weird effects occur like the character carrying their head around in their arms or even wearing them out their butts.
The only way to know is trial and error.
The first thing I would try is to redo a skin or two and see how it works out.
But I agree with them being just npcs.
I was thinking more along the lines of using the male dwarf head and just removing the facial hair, and then adding maybe a pony tail or pig tails. Or possibly using a female human face and hair skin on the dwarf. since the layout of the faces, hair skins are the same layout for all DS2 characters. then just add them to the global hair to head, face, hair gas files. Not adding a new character type per say but allowing the ds2 dwarf to have a female face. no yells the
I like the idea of using the scaling tool on human female model that Iryan mentioned. Dwarf women are strong and stocky, but still womanly looking. A girl face on the male dwarf body doesn't seem like it would look very womanly at all. Unless I am misunderstanding something, which is quite possible.
Oh yes, and agree with the npc idea.
I did a bit of testing on trying to make female dwarves with mixed results.
DS2 Human female mesh and head rescaled with the scaling tool.
The DS1 Dwarf with a female skin.
The DS1 Farmgirl mesh doesn't seem compatible with the scaling tool.
Transplanting heads doesn't work with the DS1 Dwarf model. Just resizing the human female doesn't look anything like what you'd expect a dwarf female to look like, they just look like human teen agers or children.
There is a limit to how far you can go with the scaling tool otherwise the arms look really weird.
The first one is okay, but not great and the other two just do not work. Oh Well
I wanted to ask the DS1 dwarf girl "hey, why the long face?"
(I kid, I kid)
I see what you mean about head swapping having undesirable results.
The first dwarf pictured is better.
Here's the dwarf female test files and map for anyone's who is interested.
http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/Dwarf_female_test.ds2res
Added another skin and changed the meshes to a2 and a7. A7 (Robes) looks best as it hides the muscular arms and legs.
I did try to down scale the meshes but it only works for a7 which defeats the purpose. With dwarf meshes a1 and a2 it either results in a corrupted mesh like the pic before or even worse crashes the game! So I gave up.
One idea about the skin is giving the females a veil similarly to this pic from another thread.
Maybe the veil could be very low down leaving the mouth exposed to give more indication of being female?
As for kathcf's question about why the long face - perhaps the dwarf females are sad at the lack of certain assets.